TweeLight
by Phantazm
Summary: When he was at his peak, I thought Stephen King could wipe himself, publish the paper, and have a best seller. It turns out he did just that. The paper is called "Twilight." Here, we flush the Twilight phenomenon once and for all, and you're welcome.


_TweeLight_

Adults understood nothing. That was a given. Like, a total, inescapable, and totally, like, in-your-face _given._ The girl who had taken to calling herself "Bella" stood in front of the mirror over her dresser, fastidiously applying sparkly stuff to her face. _Foundation is for buildings, not faces,_ she pouted, but not pouting so much as to disrupt the application of her sparkles.

It wasn't easy, given her penchant for walking about with her eyes half-closed and her mouth parted as though she were posing sensuously for a magazine cover, but it was what all good vampire aspirants did nowadays, especially the teenaged ones. You simply _had _to look slinky and sexy. Even if you really weren't. Finished with her cosmetic applications, her eyes still properly half-closed, she turned and—_bam._

This was the second drawback to walking about with half-lidded eyes: pinky toes kept colliding with things. It was so hard to see, but how else was she supposed to go about and properly project an air of mature sensuality when she hadn't even passed her second year of English?

Hopping on her uninjured, or less-injured, foot, "Bella" turned to face herself. By concentrating, she could see under her eyelids and tried evaluating her look. She put a hand on her hip, thrust her hips backward, and stuck out what passed for her chest. _Brings all the boys,_ she congratulated herself. Yeah, there was a bit of a chin, straight out of the Jay Leno family tree; her partly-opened mouth revealed only her two front upper incisors. _It's okay,_ she consoled herself. _"Alvin and the Chipmunks" was a funny movie._

Her hair, slightly ratty-looking, gave her what she thought was the disheveled, slightly disarrayed look that boys went for, but she wasn't after "boys." Oh, no. She was after a _man_ tonight.

And oh, he was a man. He had to be: he said so himself. Not like those others she'd had brief crushes on. Her still-semi-lidded gaze swept foggily across the posters that papered her walls. Oh, no. Eddie, her precious Eddie, was more a man than that pirate with the heavy eye makeup, more than those three music-making mannequins that had their own Disney show (oh, they were _so_ five minutes ago!), and even that blond elf from that magic ring movie. He looked positively _hetero_ next to her Eddie.

Whatever that meant, anyway. She'd heard it before and it had to be some kind of bad.

Eddie was going to take "Bella" away from all of this, from the dreary monotony of everyday existence. Nobody understood her reality, but Eddie and all he represented promised to make their fantasies a new reality, one she could live in forever and ever and never have to face anyone else again. She made a brief pirouette in the middle of her bed—_bam_—room and promptly sat on her bed, clutching the pinky toe of her other foot.

"Mildred?" Her mother's voice came muffled through the locked bedroom door.

"Don't call me that!"

"What?"

"My name is "Bella" now!"

She could almost hear her mother's eyes rolling up in her head. "Whatever you say, Mildred. Are you okay up there?"

_So typical,_ "Bella" lamented. _She never understands, she never pays attention to me. That's why she doesn't know what's going on up here! I'm so utterly alone, my life is so miserable, and that's why I'm leaving her to be with Eddie in our own little world together! I'm so alone…_

"Mildred?"

"Mom! Would you _please _leave me alone!" How was she supposed to properly emote with doting parents always bothering her?

Silence reigned just long enough for "Bella" to get the impression that her mother was rubbing her forehead in resignation. "Dinner's ready when you want it. If you don't come down for it, it'll be in the refrigerator."

_I won't be needing human food any more,_ "Bella" thought, _just like I don't need that stupid name._ She had chosen "Bella" herself. It was Italian for "beautiful" and made a decent match for her new last name (which she'd changed, too, but not legally since she was not even out of high school.) Her last name was—_once had been_—Schwan. German for "swan" but less graceful-sounding, "Schwan" had been Anglicized to "Swan," thus Mildred Schwan had slipped the surly bonds of Mom and Dad and become a "beautiful swan."

She paused momentarily. _At least my neck is long enough for that._ All the better for Eddie to bite her, anyway.

She wondered where Eddie was and her mind filled with the image of her newfound love. "Bella" thought of his awkward touches, his hesitance; for someone who watched so much _Star Trek_, she'd have thought Kirk's example would have given him some pointers, but perhaps his time at conventions had dulled his skills. The stubble on his face, which tried valiantly to give him an air of masculinity, was only visible after judicious applications of "Bella's" mascara. If she ever managed to kiss him, she'd have to remember to bring lots of tissues.

"Bella" reached for her hair gel to add the final tweaks to her styling efforts—with barely-opened eyes, she had to work mostly by feel—_bam_—but then she remembered she had none left; most of it had gone to try to style Eddie's hair. Which was just as well, she thought, since he had none anywhere else. Either he was a well-groomed man, indeed, or he was just fourteen. _No, he told me he's a man and a vampire and he's going to bite me and we're going to live in the forest together forever and bite deer and each other for the rest of our lives!_

Her cell phone rang and she snatched it up, almost opening her eyes all the way before remembering that she was supposed to be all exotic and sensual and stuff. The caller ID didn't show a familiar number; it was apparently a non-residential landline. She flipped open the phone and tentatively asked, "Who is this?"

"_Mildred! It's me!"_

"Edward? Don't call me that! Don't you remember? I'm "Bella" now! "Bella!" What's wrong with you?"

"_Jesus, lady, shut up! God, you won't believe it! All my friends, all of them…they're dead! They're gone! He killed them all and now he wants me! He's going to kill me! You have to hide me somewhere, maybe at your house!"_

She frowned at the phone. "Eddie, you can't come over. Mom won't let boys stay overnight. You know that."

"_But he's going to kill me!"_

"Who's going to kill you?"

Eddie didn't answer right away. _"Can you meet me at the Wal-Mart? I need to get away from him, close to crowds. Meet me there!"_

The line went dead and "Bella" closed the phone. Something was up with Eddie. He had to be playing a joke, that's all. He and his ancient family of noble vampires had likely developed an odd sense of humor over the millennia, and they'd decided to play a joke on her. Maybe it involved fairies and dragons and unicorns.

Either way, she got to see Eddie again, and that was all that mattered. She was the center of his world, which was as it should be: she was the center of her world, too. In fact, that was how she changed light bulbs. She held the bulb in the socket and the world revolved around her.

Pausing just long enough to stuff two handfuls of tissue into her bra—expanding it from an AA to an A cup—she hurried down the stairs and past her parents, whose obligatory commands to stop and turn around and get back here were summarily ignored.

"Mildred! You are _grounded!_"

"Yeah? How can you ground that which is ungroundable? Huh?"

She had to get to Wal-Mart to find out what had gotten Eddie's Underoos in a bunch. She hoped he still wasn't wearing his Iron Man undies. Those were so last year.

But maybe he'd washed them. That would be nice.

"Bella" began running through the trees that lay between her house and Wal-Mart. It wasn't quite dark yet—twilight still held its feeble, flickering sway—so she wouldn't need a flashlight. She did, however, have to open her eyes like a normal person and stop pretending to be other than a prepubescent sultry emo-in-training wanna-be.

However, something had gone wrong. By now, she should have been at the Wal-Mart, or at least been able to see the lights of the parking lot, and it had gotten much darker than it should have been this time of year.

_Oh, great,_ she sulked. _I'm lost. How could I get lost with the shining star of Eddie's undying, juvenile, co-dependent love to guide my way?_

She heard, or thought she heard, footsteps to her right. "Eddie?"

Nobody answered, but the footsteps seemed to go on. Since she was lost anyway, she figured she may as well follow them. Eventually they'd head out of the trees, right?

Dim though it was, she was still able to see a shadowed form ahead of her with a paler shape on the ground in front of it. She edged closer and saw that the pale form on the ground was the pasty, heavily sparkled body of Eddie, his throat covered in a dark, glistening liquid. The mascara used to highlight his few whiskers had been smudged and his hair was even more unruly than normal. And that took a lot of work, too.

"Eddie?" "Bella" took one step closer, refusing to believe what she saw. The shadow above Eddie's body raised his eyes to hers.

The blazing feral crimson gaze held her captive. "So you are the young Edward's playmate, yes?" The voice was a gentle, accented baritone.

"What?"

"These children," the man scoffed. "Playing at being creatures of the night. They tied wires to themselves to bounce about, much as Chinese cinematographers would do to their actors thirty years ago. Laughable. They prance through the forest, giving each other sickly little love bites and pretend to be vampires, but in the end they run home to their mothers' skirts, painting their faces in cosmetics from your 'Hot Topic'."

"Who are you?"

The man moved closer, but "Bella" couldn't pull her eyes from his, couldn't make her feet move, couldn't _breathe_. She didn't notice him moving but it seemed that his fiery eyes leaped forward to swallow her whole, and suddenly he was standing before her. Breath as foul as the deepest pits of damnation washed over her as he spoke. "I am the Dragon, the son of the Devil. I am Prince of Wallachia, sovereign of the house of Drakul.

"I am Dracula, and you, foolish girl, are now mine."

As the red eyes blazed hotter and sharp teeth pierced the vein of her thin neck, "Bella" had only time to bemoan the fact that Dracula was smudging her sparkles before the abyss claimed her.

The morals of the story:

1) Twilight shall ever give way to night.

2) Real vampires don't f***ing sparkle.

The End

Get over it.


End file.
